On Twitter, there are over 300 million tweets sent every day. That’s over 8,000 tweets per second.
Twitter Stats from Internet Live Stats
What’s even more shocking is that the average lifespan of a tweet is only 18 minutes (Source: Moz), and average impression rate is between 1-3% (Source: Marketing Land). This means that it’s pretty damn hard for anyone to even see your tweet.
So, what can you do to make more of your followers see your tweets in their timeline?
Simple – you retweet yourself.
The benefit of recycling your tweet is that it preserves all the likes and retweets you’ve accumulated.
It’s something I’ve seen @askaaronlee doing before.
This strategy has also been suggested by Social Sprout, Taylor Lorenz, Twitter Boost, Maximise Social Business, and many other Twitter influencers.
Most of them suggest that you manually hit the retweet button on your Twitter app.
Let me show you something better – a super easy and FREE way to automate your retweets. This trick can be set up in 10 easy steps within 5 minutes without any coding knowledge.
[Tweet “This trick will 3-4X your engagement on Twitter in 5 minutes”]Obtain Twitter API Keys
We will be using Twitter’s API and Google Scripts to automate the retweets. First, we need to obtain API keys.
1. Go to https://apps.twitter.com. Click on Create New App.
2. Give your application a name, a description and add your website (note: please add https:// to the url).
3. Agree to the terms and hit create your Twitter application. (You will need to have a mobile phone number registered to your account before you can create an application.)
4. On the next screen, make a note of your Consumer Key and Consumer Secret.
5. Create an Access Token and Access Token Secret and make a note of it too.
Create a Free Twitter Bot with Digital Inspiration
6. Head over to https://digitalinspiration.com/bots. In this example, I will show you how I set it up to retweet tweets on my Little Coders SG Twitter account.
This Google Script was created by Amit Aggarwal (@labnol on Twitter) and utilizes Twitter’s API to let you do various things – follow, unfollow, tweet, retweet etc. Anyone can set up one free action.
7. Enter your Consumer Key, Consumer Secret, Access Token and Access Token Secret.
Set your Retweet Criteria
You can retweet based on any one of Twitter’s Advanced Search Operators but I strongly do not recommend retweeting anyone but yourself. That’s dangerous stuff.
I recommend retweeting your best performing tweets (either based on number of likes or number of retweets).
8. Enter in the Twitter Search field: “from:yourusername min_faves:X” or “from:yourusername min_retweets:Y”
9. Set the Start Time and End Time. I like to set it for a time when I’m least active on Twitter so that my tweet get maximum exposure.
10. Before you hit Save, Check that you’ve set up your Twitter Bot correctly. If you have, you will see the tweets that will get automatically retweeted.
What does that do?
This means that every day at 1am, my Twitter bot will retweet any one of my Little Coders tweets that have a minimum of 3 likes, recycling it into Twittersphere, giving it a second lease of life!
On my personal @debbiediscovers Twitter account, I have it set up to auto-retweet any tweet with more than 10 likes! Why 10? That retweets roughly 3-4 tweets a day. Set up your own retweet criteria, but be warned – please don’t spam your followers.
The Result?
Based on the 1,326 tweets I sent between February and April 2018, I retweeted 95 of my own tweets (7%). Before I started this experiment, I would get on average 4 likes, 1 retweet and 2 URL clicks per tweet. For those 95 retweets, I got an average of 16 likes, 6 retweets and 12 URL clicks.
That’s a staggering 190% increase in impressions, 330% increase in likes, 416% increase in retweets. What’s more impressive is that it resulted in a 388% increase in URL clicks per tweet! Talk about social proof in action!
Pretty sweet for a simple trick, don’t you think?
[Tweet “This little trick has helped me increase my average likes per tweet by 330%! “]Don’t believe me, try it for yourself! Now anyone can double your engagement on Twitter with this easy tip!
P.S. Don’t overdo it, you don’t want your entire timeline to look like you do nothing but retweet your self. If you tweet 20 times a day, aim for 4 retweets. If 4-5 times a day, aim for 1 retweet.
P.P.S. If you want more actions (follow, unfollow, like, etc), you can purchase premium Twitter bots from Digital Inspiration here.
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